Cut From The Same Paper That Was Folded Long Ago
by IShipItAllAndThenSome
Summary: Even America was swept up in the futile super soldier craze of the 1900s. Surprisingly, the CIA's attempt was one of the greatest successes - and one Hanna Heller is living, breathing proof. After she came out of hiding in 2011 and traipsed around Europe for three years, S.H.I.E.L.D. decided they wanted her. Bad. Why not use the only other successful super soldiers to bring her in?
1. Chapter 1

**So. I'm very sorry that this isn't an update to Tug. It's just... ASDFGHJKL SO HARD WRITING STRAIGHT FROM MOVIES WHAT IF I HURT MY DVD ASDFGHJKL**

***clears throat* Moving on! This fic is something that's been bouncing around inside my brainpan for a while now, and I really wanted to get it out there, now that I have a copy of _Hanna_ of my very own. Thankfully, I will not be writing from the movie because everything takes place after canon. So. HA HA HA HA!**

**I hope you all enjoy this crossover, because there shall be chapters upon chapters. Maybe. Agh. AAAAGGGGHHHH!  
**

**Rated M for: References to murder, lesbians, war crimes from the early 1900's, genetic modification, oil-painted breasts in artwork, smoking, and spying.**

* * *

S.H.I.E.L.D. had its ubiquitous fingers in, apparently, every potentially lethal pot.

Natasha learned this because, apparently, even the CIA had been working on one. It spanned most of Europe, with bases in Germany, Morocco, Siberia - even dear old Stalingrad.

Natasha learned this because, apparently, one of their test subjects survived their extermination protocol in 1996, and had come aboveground in 2011, taking out every standard G.I. put on her tail.

Natasha learned this because she was not standard government issue.

The girl's name was Hanna Heller. She was now nineteen years old and invisible to most intelligence agencies and agents. Her father - and it was a struggle not to call Erik Heller her SO, because he trained her, he made her into what she was - had taught her well.

Natasha had been keeping tabs on Hanna Heller for almost three years. Immediately after the death of Agent Wiegler, she'd managed to find herself a camper van and started her trek across the continent. She was very careful of CCTV, of observance. She used gas stations with uninterested workers and avoided those who watched their clientele like hawks; she never used the same alias twice within a hundred mile span.

She started in Berlin, paying a visit to the Wall with her blonde hair pulled back in a tight knot at the nape of her neck so the grey hood of a sweatshirt two sizes too big fit more comfortably, covered her face. Still, from the right angle, one could see a smiling pink mouth reciting the Wall's history, the pads of slender deft fingers hovering in front of the gaping, raw edges left by Mauerspechte.

From there, she drove to Poland, and made stops at every major ex-Nazi footprint - Auschwitz, KZ Majdanek, the Krakow Ghetto. She stopped at the Cloth Hall in Krakow, again reciting the history of the place.

Then it was off to Athens, to Bucharest, to Odesa, to Kyiv, Kharkiv, Moscow, Minsk, Tallinn, St. Petersburg. She sometimes drove days out of her way to find some obscure spot, to sit down with knees drawn up to her chest and recite its history.

She made her way to Finland, left her RV out about two thousand kilometers from the cabin she'd lived in for thirteen years. With a telescope and a nest on a little peak with a clear view, she watched the empty little shack, watched as the last few agents returned to base, watched as snow fell through an unrepaired hole in the roof in the midst of a blizzard.

Watched as her once-loved home died of loneliness.

After two weeks in sub-zero temperatures, surviving off of raw meat and fistfuls of snow, she ran through the woods under the cover of darkness and made it to the cabin by dawn.

Natasha didn't have eyes inside; nor did any other agent or agency. She still does not know exactly what happened in that cabin, or why.

After thirty minutes, Heller stole out of the house, white-blonde hair barely blending in with the glinting snow.

When she made it back to her camper van, she reached under her coat and retrieved a homing beacon - CIA circa 1990's - and flipped a switch.

Two thousand kilometers away, the shack crumbled into dust with a puff of heat and smoke.

It was the eleventh of March, 2012. It had taken Heller exactly one year to make it that far, and from there, she began another encyclopedic pub crawl. She drove to Helsinki and the Hietaniemi Cemetery, island-hopped to Stockholm and stood in the mathematical center of Norrmalmstorg, drove Göteborg and spent a week watching all their ballets, to Oslo.

She packed a small, watertight knapsack and sold her RV. Swam to Denmark, bought a poorly-maintained '50 Nimbus Bomber and repaired it and rode to Hamburg. Bought a burger in every restaurant she saw.

Went to Belgium and did the same with waffles.

To Milan, Rome, Turin, Marseille, Paris.

Everywhere she went, she took pictures of beautiful and ugly things, filling up rolls and rolls of film. A small leather camera bag around her neck, pockets bulging with film canisters, each one bleeding snapshots of supermodels breathing smoke like dragons and gum spat on cobblestones and hunched throngs of people blustering through traffic.

This took her another year. In Paris, under the name Trudy, she stayed at a hotel for three weeks and developed every single photograph twice. She made four neat stacks - _first year, second year, for myself, for Sophie._

Natasha watched her lips move as she said that, watched her slip one first year stack into a lavender envelope from the hotel lobby and address it in silver gel pen - childish and silly and the colour that made Sophie's blue eyes gleam - watched her do the same with a second year stack.

The rest of the photos were stuffed into a well-worn, water- and blood-stained copy of Grimm's Faerie Tales and, in turn, stuffed into her knapsack.

The photos were fed into a thick manilla envelope, and Hanna filled the rest of the orange paper packet with a very, very, very long letter.

Hanna spent another three months biking around France, sleeping in parks and hotels and the occasional patch of wildlands, if only for one night, parking outside post offices and very nearly mailing the package.

She finally mailed it to one Sophie Fox, aged nineteen, on the first of June, 2013; on the third, it arrived in the mail.

Hidden in the middle of a stack of university acceptance letters, that manilla envelope brooked the widest smile.

S.H.I.E.L.D. never got a copy of the letter. It was not deemed a priority at the time, and Sophie burned it with a vanilla bean candle after reading it.

She burned every envelope, too, and dumped the ashes into her mother's compost bin. She kept the photos, however, bound tight with a fluorescent pink rubber band that once held organic asparagus stalks and tucked under her pillow.

Hanna Heller disassembled her '50 Nimbus and mailed it, swam to Kinsale, Ireland, where she put it back together and rode to Cork, to Killarney, to Limerick, to Galway, to Castlebar, to Sligo, to Dublin. Once a week, she sent Sophie a postcard with no return address. Sophie replied every time, mailing it to the coordinates written in lieu of a closing line.

Drogheda.

Dundalk.

Londonderry.

Bangor.

Disassembly, shipping, swimming, reassembly.

Heller spent a fortnight on the Isle of Man for the IMTT, racing. She did not win the Single Cylinder race, though she had been riding at a 75mph; instead, she'd stopped and ferried two crash victims to the nearest hospital. She made the news.

What made it more than an inch-long local human interest piece was the fact that she carried two fully-grown, rather large men over her shoulders as she ran from the Hairpin to Noble's Hospital.

S.H.I.E.L.D. decided then that Hanna Heller needed to be contained. She was making herself noticed, making herself too big. None of it was intentional, either; she ran that distance as casually as if she were jogging half a block to get some milk. She hid from agents, from reporters, from public officials, but she never hid from normal people. She played with children and dogs, helped people carry their groceries and move into new houses, fetched cats out of eighty-foot-tall trees.

Sophie wrote letters with newspaper clippings paperclipped in.

On the first of July, she mentioned in one that she thought someone was watching her house.

Hanna wrote back, told her that she'd stop writing for a while, that she'd be nearby.

She sold her motorcycle, packed her knapsack, and swam to Blackpool. She bought a fourth-hand black sedan, waxed it to a glossy government issue finish, and drove to Swindon.

...

The Swindon Art Gallery, with its classically Grecian columns, was inviting despite the CCTV, because Hanna knew Sophie was inside. She parked on Clicklade Street and made her way through the scant crowd to the back of the building.

It was summer, now, and nearing three years since they'd first met, but it still surprised Hanna how different Sophie looked. Her long, soft legs were mostly bared by fawn-coloured twill shorts, and a soft-looking white cardigan covered her midriff more thoroughly than her vacation clothes had. The girl who lived in Hanna's memories was always so very visible, so tangible; the curve of her waist and of her belly and of her ribs was something she could not have helped being aware of, but in this air conditioned museum, the flesh of her was concealed and she was anomalous.

At least to Hanna. This was not the babbling sixteen-year-old who kissed and laughed and shared and danced. This was the eighteen-year-old who clacked across blond wood floors that shone like snow and smiled at canvas like it was telling her the secret of a lifetime.

On silent rubber-soled feet, she crept up beside her very first friend and tapped her cashmere shoulder.

Sophie's narrow blue eyes flicked over to Hanna, observed her, recognised her; one soft hand dropped to cradle Hanna's callused one like a nest cradles a fledgeling.

Very quietly, Hanna remarked, "The woman on the left has three breasts."

Sophie's entire face exploded, a dimpled supernova, as she smiled. "And only one eye. Loads of his stuff is almost photographic - very serious - but this one? I always wonder if Walter Poole was spliffed up."

A raspy, warm little giggle, and Hanna laughed too, even though she didn't understand what was funny. She kept her head down, careful of every camera, and twisted her fingers into Sophie's like a figure-eight knot - unbreakable.

They snuck out the back and waited in a loading dock, in a blind spot between cameras. Hanna slid her hood down, pushed up her sleeves, sighed. This was not her weather, and she was not thriving. She was a marshland tree in the desert. She was drowning in heat.

Sophie pulled out a cigarette, lit it. The click of the lighter igniting made Hanna's heart bruise itself on her ribs, made her fingers tremble, but she ground the unnecessary adrenaline into the concrete beneath her shoes like ash.

"Your photos are lovely," Sophie said, at long last.

"I wanted to show you something about myself," Hanna replied, lilting little snowflake, Finnish forest faerie. "Something true. It only seemed fair. I knew all of your truths, and the only one you knew of me was ugly."

"You saved my life."

"You had nothing to do with Wiegler. You were brought in because of me; I put you in danger, so I took you out of it."

Sophie sighed then, smoke curling through the air, and kicked off her rust-coloured sandals, sinking down to her natural height. She was small, but broad-boned, built to box. Hanna liked that; she was made for something violent and instead she surrounded herself with peace, with beauty. With three-breasted Cyclopes.

"The world isn't like that. It's not so direct."

"Why isn't it? I protected you. You are my friend. This is what friends do." Hanna fingered the woven bracelet she'd fought tooth and nail to preserve for nigh unto three years. "Isn't it?"

Sophie sighed again, but this sigh was lighter. Lemongrass and rain rather than grease and sea water. "Yes, Hanna. Friends take care of each other."

Silence. Feet scooting over pavement, fingers rasping through hair. Lips touching - dry at first, then wet, open, hungry.

"If someone is watching you, I will make them stop."

Sophie did not ask, and Hanna did not tell.

By the end of the week, the agents who had been watching the Foxes for any sign of Hanna Heller were all in hiding.

...

Fury decided then that he wanted her on S.H.I.E.L.D.'s payroll.

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**Please read and review, especially if you'd like this to continue. **


	2. Chapter 2

**I thought that I should mention that the title of this story comes from the song _Identical Snowflakes _by Hem. I also thought I should apologize for this chapter taking an actual month to come out. I am so, so sorry. **

**Content Warning for genetic modification, PTSD, and medical examination.**

* * *

Hanna took a long, circuitous route to Sophie's flat in the wee hours of the morning, fussing with her tangles the way Sophie had done that night in Spain. Mind flooded with warm cinnamon-coloured memories of late-night motorbike rides and soft kisses under a pink blanket, a deep sense of calm flooded her, buoying her to the front door.

She knocked - once, twice - with firm, easy precision, then rocked back on her heels, waiting.

Sophie rushed to the door, bare feet slapping against the linoleum in her front hall. She flung the door open and tugged Hanna in by the waist, hugging her like mad. Hanna just melted into the hug; she hadn't had any physical contact at all since before Wiegler.

"Oh, I am so glad to see you." Kicking the door shut with one long leg, Sophie dragged her into the kitchen, sitting her down at the table and grabbing the electric kettle. "Nobody's been stalking me to Tesco or the laundromat or to work, so whatever you did, thank you."

"I didn't kill anyone," Hanna said, eyes bright. "I promise."

Sophie blinked owlishly, still holding the kettle. It took her a moment, but she started giggling, slumped onto a stool.

"You looked upset the last time I killed someone for you. I didn't want to - " She cut herself off, listening to Sophie's sweet, snorty laugh, watching her round cheeks redden like new roses. "Why are you laughing?"

"Just... Oh, Jesus, Hanna! I'm not laughing at you. Only, you looked so earnest, with these big old puppy eyes, promising nobody got murdered." Sophie managed to calm down, reaching across the island to squeeze Hanna's delicate, pale hand. "I _was_ upset. I had just been kidnapped and interrogated by some mad American bitch about shit I didn't even understand. I was tired, I was scared, I was angry. And then you - you swoop in like some bloody superhero, kicking arse and taking names, like a fucking Avenger, and then you sprint off like a startled deer. More than anything else, I was shocked. And worried."

"I am not a superhero." Hanna stared down at their hands, Sophie's tanned-freckled-soft enveloping her callused-pale. "I am an experiment that walked out of the lab and does the right thing when she can."

"'Scuse me, but that's a superhero, Miss Sri Lanka," she retorted, tugging Hanna's knuckles up to her lips, pressing a balm-sticky kiss to the back of her hand. "You should wear a cape."

"Capes are impractical."

"And sexy."

It was Hanna's turn to blink, pale cheeks burning. "I will consider a cape."

"That's my girl." Sophie patted her cheek fondly, stilling to stroke Hanna's cheek and the knotted cornsilk of her hair. Slowly, they both leaned forward to connect halfway across the island, lips nearly meeting when a shrill insistent whine filled the kitchen.

Hanna startled, surveying the room and searching out the source of the sound, every muscle singing with tension.

"Relax, Han. It's the kettle. Water's done." Sophie slid off the stool and shut the kettle off, reaching up into the cabinets. "What tea d'you want?"

"Tea is an aromatic beverage commonly prepared by pouring hot or boiling water over cured leaves of the tea plant,_ Camellia sinensis_. After water, tea is the most widely consumed beverage in the world." She smiled, cheeks dimpling and eyes shining. "Lemon zinger, please."

Sophie nodded, pulling two boxes down and preparing their drinks. "Still an encyclopaedia?" she asked, beaming.

"I have a genetically enhanced eidetic memory," Hanna replied, leaning forward.

Sophie hummed, bopping around the kitchen as she mixed milk and sugar into her own tea before sliding both mugs across the tabletop. "Your photographs were beautiful, by the way."

"I didn't want to risk writing." Hanna took a deep breath, sucking in the warm citrusy steam before taking a sip. "But there were so many beautiful things. I wanted you to see them, too."

Sophie sat down next to her, crossing long legs over her lap, and kissed her softly, arm looped around her shoulders. "There must have been one missing, because there weren't any pictures of you."

Hanna positively beamed, dropping her head to Sophie's shoulder, not slipping off even as she started laughing.

"God, that was awful. What a_ line!_ _Je_sus. Uni is _not_ helping, _at all." _Her cheeks were bright red again, a sheepish shade, and Hanna wanted to pull out her camera and capture it.

"I didn't notice. I was flattered." Hanna, tentative, leaned in and kissed her cheek. "Your tea's getting cold."

They both turned back to their teas, sipping away, occasionally dropping a quiet word between them, piling up every crumb into a catch-up conversation that filled in every gap the past three years had made. The sky lightened; Sophie made two loaves of toast and ate two slices, watching with growing amazement as Hanna's supercharged metabolism fed itself.

Hanna soaked that attention up like a sponge. After a lifetime of living under the radar, she couldn't stand the thought of losing Sophie's focus. She encouraged the art major to sit on her back while she did endless push-ups, giddy giggles tripping through her ears. Sophie even did some of her summer coursework from that bobbing muscular seat, two textbooks and an archaic laptop perched on Hanna's shoulders, reading descriptions of Reuben's work aloud.

"They've all got rather huge arses, see?" She set her book down between Hanna's hands, letting her look over a few examples. "It's weird. I don't think anyone's arse can be that size with waists that small."

"They're very nice," Hanna said, shifting to one hand so she could pass the book back up. "The - the rears, I mean. Not that the paintings aren't, but that seems sort of a poor critique. I don't want to sound stupid."

"You have the entire periodic table memorised, Han. There's no way you could sound stupid."

Eventually, lunch rolled around. Hanna offered, "I can go find us something to eat."

"No rabbits," Sophie ordered, hand on hip, finger wagging even as she beamed. "There's a nice Chinese a few blocks down."

"I promise. No hunting." Hanna tucked her hair back up under her hoodie, slipped into her shoes, and accepted a tenner from Sophie's dinner money jar. "Good bye." She gave Sophie a hug, a kiss on the cheek, and then took off at an easy sprint.

She delighted in the bell hanging from the threshold of the restaurant's door, in it's bright little chime, and slid into line, chatting happily in Mandarin with the fry cook. Even so, she still noticed the ginger woman watching her from the booth by the bathroom, and her stomach gave a lurch.

After grabbing a warm paper bag that smelled of fried dough and warm broccoli, cold cans of soda pressing against her hip, she made her way to the door, delighting once more in the bell's jangling cry as she made note of a shiny black SUV sitting outside. She started running in earnest this time, outpacing every car and truck in the street, adrenaline slaloming through her bloodstream.

Taking forty extra minutes via back roads and rooftops, Hanna finally climbed in through the bathroom window, sneakered feet squeaking on the wet shower floor.

"Hanna! What the_ fuck_ are you_ doing?_"

Hanna blinked. _Oh. Sophie's naked. _

"Someone was following me. Government." The paper bag lost its molecular integrity, soggy brown paper giving way to heavy aluminum cans and plastic tubs of food. "American government. I had to take evasive action. I'm sorry." Her heart kept slamming itself into her ribcage like a battering ram, violent and fierce, and she sank to the floor, water pummeling her scalp and shoulders.

"Don't apologise." Sophie crouched down to Hanna's level, brushing tangled wet curls out of her eyes with delicate fingers. "Are you _okay?_"

"I am fine," Hanna said, shaking her head. "She had red hair. I just. She had red hair."

Sophie swore in a rather spectacular display, hands moving slowly toward the zip on Hanna's hoodie. "Your clothes are soaked. You're going to need to be dry when we make a run for it."

Hanna blinked, eyes wide and more than a little confused, but let Sophie gingerly undress her, trail fingertips over faint silver scars and hard, ropy muscle. She just shut down for the shower, remembering bloodstained Grimm's pages(seventy two) and the smiling face of a woman with pale green hair(one), counted through every time she bested her father when they sparred(forty), replayed every time she and Sophie had kissed(four).

She floated back into her own skin when it was covered with a thick red towel, Sophie standing behind her as she worked knots out of her hair.

"What time is it?"

"Just before two."

Hanna stood, running calculations to compensate for the lost twenty minutes as the comb trapped in a particularly fearsome snarl smacked her in the shoulder blade. "You said 'when we make a run for it.' Are you going somewhere?"

"The last time someone was hunting you down and you left me behind, I got kidnapped and interrogated. I'm coming with you, Han. Now, let me finish combing you out."

"We don't have enough time."

"Four seconds," Sophie bargained, tearing the comb down through the knot. Hanna didn't make a sound, though a flare of pain shot through her nose in sympathy. "I was trying to be gentle earlier."

Hanna nodded, marching toward Sophie's bedroom and tearing a pair of cargo pants and a t-shirt out of her closet. "Hurry up getting dressed. Whoever followed me will be here soon."

Sophie nodded, shrugging into a bra before turning towards the clothes she'd laid out at the foot of her bed the night before. "It's not - it isn't her, is it?"

"Wiegler's dead. I shot her. Twice." Hanna stepped into her damp sneakers, flipping wet curls out of her shirt. "This agent was younger."

They were gone in four minutes, ducking behind a row of recycling bins as S.H.I.E.L.D. agents broke into Sophie's flat. Hanna stole the plates off of one sedan, driving off with a safe cover.

After three days in the car, Sophie pulled them over to a tiny Welsh B&B, shepherding a half-conscious, attack-ready super soldier into bed. After making certain that Hanna was comfortable - helping her out of her jeans and shoes, unzipping her hoodie - Sophie ducked into the shower and rinsed seventy two hours of car sweat down the drain.

The grandmotherly scented soap left her hair dry but clean, and she dressed in shorts and a tank top before sliding in next to Hanna. The blonde stiffened, eyes moving beneath their lids as if surveying the room for assailants, before she snuggled into Sophie's side, burying her face in her soft-skinned neck.

The two of them awoke together at the smell of sweet oats and briny laver, Hanna gliding to the door and carrying in two plates of room service. After trading grilled tomatoes for toast and adding appropriate measures of sugar and milk to their respective teas, they tucked in like they'd been eating nothing but scant crap for three days. The only sound until they'd finished eating was the scrape of silverware against plates and chewing.

Finally, sated and relaxed, Sophie flopped onto her back, hair spilling out around her shoulders, and looked over at Hanna. "How long d'you reckon we'll have to keep on running?"

Hanna frowned, tossing and catching the butter knife. "Until they stop following us. You don't have to do this, you know." She turned, frown turned on Sophie, snow-blue eyes wide and concerned. "You had a job. People get jobs, or they try, anyways, and everything I've read over the past three years has said that they're near impossible to get."

Toss. Catch. Toss. Catch.

Sophie stared at the glinting silver blade, mesmerized, and scooted over so her head was nestled in Hanna's lap. "It was only an internship. Besides, I was being tailed. If I'd stayed, I probably would have been under constant surveillance for years - until I was so decrepit that I couldn't even walk down the street to get a bloody packet of crisps without shattering my pelvis."

Toss, catch, toss, catch.

"I don't want you shattering anything," Hanna murmured, raking slender fingers through her hair.

"That's very sweet, Han, but that's not the point. I'd rather be on the run with you, where I'm safe and where I know you're safe, than wait _another two years_ and get an _envelope_ of _fucking photographs_ as your _only_ communication!"

Sophie was shouting. She didn't know why she was shouting, but she was; she roared like a typhoon, like a lion, like rage personified.

_Toss_catch_toss_catch_toss_catch_toss_catch

"You ran off!" Her fist slammed into the worn carpet, dull thuds shaking the floorboards. "My family was _kidnapped_ because of you, we were _interrogated!_ I thought we were going to be _tortured_, Hanna, and we got out fine in the end, but we were terrified. My brother still has nightmares. He's_ ten_, and he wakes up _screaming_, because of what happened - because of what _you made happen."_

_Tosscatchtosscatchtosscatchtosscatch_

"I'm sorry." The butterknife was a blur in her hand, knuckles white every time she squeezed it, as if she were trying to repent like a saint through pain that wouldn't come. "I didn't - "

"And you... you left." Sophie was quiet, then. She curled her hand into the battered shag of the rug, slumping in on herself. "I was so scared, Hanna. I was terrified. Miles told Wiegler where you were going, and I was so scared that she'd caught you, and hurt you, and you didn't tell me you were okay."

Hanna slid the knife into a gap between the floor and the baseboards by the door and inched closer, freezing when Sophie flinched back.

"I'm sorry." She shrank, curling inwards like a frog's tongue, withdrawing. "I did not mean to upset you. You were my friend - my _first_ friend. I wanted you safe. I'm sorry."

Sophie let out a quiet huff, scooting over to Hanna's side. "Han, I didn't mean - it's just a lot. You kept asking if I wanted to leave you, and I don't, but Hanna, you kept asking me to, and I kept thinking... all these awful things."

Hanna shook her head. "I thought you were my friend, Sophie. I didn't know you thought that."

"I don't!"

Hanna stood, stepping into her borrowed shorts and sneakers. "Yes," she said calmly, "you do. You wouldn't have said them if some part of you didn't."

She was down the stairs before the door shut, dashing around the greenery-coated grounds with her eyes squeezed shut, the soles of her feet pounding Sophie's word into the soil.

The last misty fingers of dawn had long since melted away when Hanna lapped around to the car park and saw one sleek black sedan with S.H.I.E.L.D. plates. Sweat drenched and steel-eyed, she launched herself up the side of the building, swinging in through the unoccupied room below her and landing, panther-silent, on the floorboards. She dashed up the stairs with nary a sound, easing the door open and picking up the butterknife.

An agent sat on the foot of their bed at Sophie's side, and Hanna's vision went white. With a shout, she flung herself at the redhead, throwing her to the floor and pressing the blunt blade to her throat. "Why are you following us?"

"I'm Agent Romanoff of the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, And Logistics Division of the United States government. I'm here to talk."

Hanna pressed two fingers to the side of her throat. No raised heartbeat, no pupil dilation, no sweat, no tells. "Are you a liar?"

"Ask your girlfriend."

Hanna's head swung sharply over to Sophie, eyes wide as she searched frantically for any sign of injury. "Sophie? She hasn't hurt you, has she?"

Sophie shook her head. "Han, she's okay. She's not CIA, we're fine." She dropped to her knees, laid a hand on Hanna's back, and kissed her temple. "She didn't hurt me. She's safe."

Hanna nodded haltingly, swinging a leg off over Agent Romanoff's hip, and sat, crosslegged, tossing and catching the knife. "If you don't intend to exterminate or assault us, talk."

...

Natasha took in the fourth confirmed super soldier - at 5'6", she was two inches taller than Natasha, but at least ten pounds lighter; a fight would be pretty evenly matched, though Hanna seemed to have a slightly feral edge when it came right down to it. Her companion seemed adept at calming her, which was, to say the least, helpful.

Something about the girl's eyes made Natasha think that in her hands, that butterknife could have easily been the death of her.

"SHIELD has, in its employ, three survivors of various super soldier experiments, including the greatest success in recorded history," she began. "Twenty nine years ago, an operative from the Russian Red Room was extracted by a S.H.I.E.L.D. operative and recruited. In 2008, Dr. Bruce Banner was affected by a super soldier experiment gone wrong, and he's been taken in by S.H.I.E.L.D. Steve Rogers, also known as Captain America, was extracted from Norwegian ice in 2012 by S.H.I.E.L.D. All agents have been well-accommodated and cared for. All we ask is that you come in for examination. There are certain risks associated with super soldier experiments that we want to take care of, should they appear in you."

Hanna visibly tensed, ducking into Sophie's side, eyes gone steely.

"We don't intend to cause you any harm, Ms. Heller. You are more than capable of escaping should we do anything you don't approve of, and we're aware of that. Come with us to New York, let us examine you, and once we're done, you're free to go."

Hanna nodded, face blank. "The CIA changed my genes. From what I read, they attempted to increase the tensile strength of my skin, muscle, bone, memory, and IQ, as well as decreasing my neurochemical ability to feel empathy, compassion, and remorse. They may have also done something to my immune system and metabolism."

Natasha nodded. All of those seemed standard for super soldier experiments, but interference from birth seemed to be intrinsic only in European experiments.

"We're prepared for any eventuality."

Hanna nodded again and rose fluidly, picking up her bag. "Let's go, then."

Sophie shook her head, scrambling to her feet. "I'm not getting left behind again. I'm coming with you."

Hanna blinked, mouth slack, lips parted in surprise. "But..."

"More of me loves you than is cross with you, Han. And I want to make sure you're okay."

Natasha watched, mildly uncomfortable as the two teenagers clung to each other like shipwreck survivors to driftwood. Sophie threw the previous day's clothes into a knapsack and they checked out inside of six minutes.

In ten, they were on the road.

In an hour, they boarded the Helicarrier.


End file.
